Failure to fail learning from failure

We are all told how important it is to fail, but when it gets concrete we an aversion to own up for good reason as owning up to failure goes against our innermost being. The strange thing however is that those that own up usually will get benefits from it as they are seen as really experienced. The other thing that paralysis us as architects is that we usually overestimate ourselves. Architects are usually people with a real problem with being humble and as such before we start any undertaking very few architects will look at previous disasters. This is also one of the reasons that some industries are insisting on an agile approach as they are often trying the same thing for decades with a lot of failed projects.

I personally have often seen it beneficial to concentrate on failed projects just to discover that they were often lead by people much more intelligent than myself, failing in things I would have tried and sometimes I later succeeded by actually trying something I would never have otherwise done such as deliberately lowering the quality of the delivery. Most fellow architects I work with however still think that all the previous architects must have been loser just to usually fail in the same way. I personally know of an insurance that took 32 years to finally replace a system and at the end the replacement was done by the kid of one of the IT managers as a holiday project as an internship. So I really recommend that you look at failure with the assumption that the previous guys were as bright as you are. I know this is not part of any framework, but instead real life experience that may help you.